There are at least two different kinds of genealogy task. One is recording conclusions of existing research and another is doing new research. A kind of mixed task is recording both conclusions and evidence from ongoing research.
I haven't seen any tool that does a really good job for organizing new research. For that task you want collections of source material, notes, and speculations which may be tied to an individual, a family, a location, a surname, or other ad-hoc organization schemes.
Existing software is universally bad at the "here's some pieces I'm trying to sort out" research tasks. The organization with research is less based on individuals and their relationships and more on source documents and their contents and associations and interpretations.
The best way I have been able to do this is to write a book as I am doing my research. I organize an outline for the ancestors, fill in the details I can find as paragraphs, and pretty much have a footnote (or sometimes two) with every sentence with a source.
For a particularly tricky ancestor, it will start as just a list of sources or leads in roughly chronological order. I work through and try to form these sources into narrative paragraphs as I piece together what is accurate, how they are connected to children/parents/spouses/etc. In some cases, I disprove other people's unsupported theories, and in some cases I present a case for my own conclusions, noting any ambiguity or uncertainty.
I then update my primary tree (on Ancestry.com) with the results of my research, and link or upload the most important original documents there. At some point, I'll upload PDFs of the chapters to the relevant people's pages.
Is there software that could organize this all and make it easier? I'm not totally sure, but I'd be open to considering it.
And in the realm of online family tree services, there are two approaches. One is you build your own tree, but with the help of other people's trees and other records. That's what ancestry is. The other type is the single universal tree that is built collaboratively. That's what wikitree is, and familysearch also has that as a component.
For what I've done, wikitree is a great match, but where things are messed up by people being sloppy, it can be pretty hard to straighten it all out.
I use gramps fairly extensively for some semi-serious genealogy work and love it. It is extremely flexible, while also trying to remain true to standards such as GEDCOM.
One thing I love is that, as a python programmer, I can script various operations. This prevents some tedium with some things like inputting censuses or making sure images have the correct links to citations, etc.
So even though it is pretty friendly, it's also very power user friendly.
> It is extremely flexible, while also trying to remain true to standards such as GEDCOM.
I'm not overly familiar with gramps, but with GEDCOM, in my experience, it's sort of pick flexible or use the standard, not both.
For example, the GEDCOM has no way of interlinking relationships across generations. That is, someone cannot be both daughter and spouse, at the same time, which unfortunately isn't that rare an occurrence if you go back a few generations. (You can theoretically construct an XREF:INDI: that points to the one individual, but it breaks every parser when the pointer appears in both the descendants, and other relationships).
The Gramps Project introduced a custom XML format for storing & describing data. It doesn't rely on GEDCOM, although it can import/export that GEDCOM as a legacy format.
> You can theoretically construct an XREF:INDI: that points to the one individual, but it breaks every parser when the pointer appears in both the descendants, and other relationships
I read that as a bug in many implementations, not in the standard. Do you agree?
I used this to create my family tree (several hundred entries, previously only on paper) as a gift to a family member when they married. It was actually easy to use. I'm glad there is a good offline version instead of the online alternatives.
I used this and love it. One feature that would be nice is some form of group source control. Like git with PRs. I want other members of my family to participate but I can't figure out how to do that
It's quite cool to see this still in active development. I did a segment on it for a long gone show on then Tech TV called "The Screen Savers" back in the very early 2000s, and I thought it was pretty slick back then...to see its still going is a testament to a well managed project it was/is.
Outside of religious concerns for LDS, I'd be interested to hear why people are interested in their family trees.
I know one or two anecdotes about my grandparents' parents but have no real interest in learning more about them. Perhaps I am too young to understand the appeal, or perhaps it's a cultural thing?
Genealogists tend to be an older crowd for sure, for a mix of reasons. I'm just entering middle age, so I can only speak for myself. I remember as a very small boy doing an elementary school family history project and finding it captivating. There were people I had never met but played an important role in determining who I was and the family culture I grew up in. To me, that is just inherently fascinating, and I have a hard time understanding people who don't feel that way (even though almost no one I know shares this passion, including my closest friends and family members). I think most genealogists have a similar experience. We end up finding 4th cousins who we are are very tangentially related to, but we bond over our shared interest in our ancestors and the process of genealogy research.
For me, genealogy is almost a perfect fit for my skills and interests: I believe strongly in the importance of family, I enjoy history and geography, I am trained as a lawyer so I can decipher the many legal documents that lead to important details, I enjoy the detective work involved in cracking hard cases, I enjoy the sense of completion of filling in a new branch on the tree, I enjoy writing and sharing my research with family members, I'm a skeptical person and have good critical reasoning skills, so I can spot a lot of errors in other people's research and try to correct them. Perhaps most of all, I enjoy learning about the lives of my ancestors. I feel that telling their story honors them and keeps their memory alive, and that's important to me. I hope some day my descendants will enjoy reading my work.
There are some people who get the bug for genealogy and get really into it, and maybe that helps explain why.
To answer your question of motivation/appeal to know more about your grandparents' parents (and beyond), here is one data point - I grew up hearing that my mother was related to the Alsatian polymath Albert Schweitzer (1) and I've wanted to see exactly how we are related. Also I've heard family stories that on my father's side, his grandfather's surname was changed upon entry at the massive Ellis Island immigration facility (2) and I wanted to know more about our previous family name and history back in Sweden.
I've done quite a lot of family research and I'm fairly young (I think????) being just 30.
I'm somewhat of a history buff and while History generally happens through some great event, big time general or king or the like. history with a small h happens through the people simply living their lives.
I live in Sweden and the records we have available are extensive enough from say mid 1700s and onward to give you glimpses into my relatives life. I can reconstruct a story of how my great-great-great-granparents met while both working on the same farm, eventually moving into their own farmstead and later having children.
I can see how one of my relatives _really_ didn't want to be in the military since he fled three times, eventually the military just gave up in collecting him the third time.
Or how one of my relatives moved to America to make a new life for himself.
To me it really brings history within touching distance and makes it more human.
I considered using Gramsps because I have a big family and I am not good with names. I was not interested in tracking back my family many generations, just understanding who was who among all of my living family members, even those I would only see once a year or less frequently.
I'm also doing the same! Started out as a generic "Contacts" database with phones, emails, birthdays, etc. but evolved into an RDF store with a lot of connections between individuals like "X is-parent-of Y", "A married B on this date and location", etc. etc.
It’s fun, it’s like solving a puzzle. You get to play detective.
For me getting in to genealogy was a two week thing, I found all relatives 4-5 generations back. After that I got bored. Sometimes it’s fun when 23andme finds someone that I am related to and I get to figure out in which way.
This is just a subset of people who do it, but I've seen some people in fairly spiritual/esotericist circles get into genealogy. It seemed like some of them were hoping to find answers to some issues they were struggling with in their family history.
Apparently in some schools of thought from that area there is a lot of focus on family relationships and the fate of one's ancestors and how those may affect people across generations. I feel like newer generations tend to take more of an individualistic/"blank slate" view of their heritage, whereas I've encountered a lot of older people who gave much more thought/weight to where their ancestry came from and things that happened generations ago.
Some people like it, some people don't, and there's no issue with that. I second the other comment about how it is like solving mysteries, with a combination of trying to get to know people that you've never met and can never meet.
> I know one or two anecdotes about my grandparents' parents
One thing you can find is that those anecdotes aren't correct. We have some family lore around my grandfather and something he did in the service. However, in reviewing military records for his unit and his own diary after he passed away, it's likely (in my opinion) that he was exaggerating quite a bit, if not outright fabricating things. Humans are funny creatures :)
My interest was driven by coming across some family tree research my paternal great-grandmother and great-great grandmother did 100 years ago. I wanted to bring it up today's genealogical standards, if only to help out my childrens' children.
Many of stories I've found are gut wrenching and brand new to me, as in never spoken by any living generation, and yet, generations persisted after that event.
So, to me, it's a kind of very unique resilience that can be told only through dusting off your own family tree.
My wife wanted a picture with a family tree in the sitting room, where there's a picture of a real tree and names and photos all over the branches of the tree, because she saw the family tree of her uncle. She is Asian.
We tried Gramps about a month ago and discovered that Gramps didn't seem to support this use case easily. It's a pity because the name «Gramps» seems to hint at easy usability for simple people, too.
Can you recommend low-cost software? If the software covers wooden family trees well I am ready to invest even a couple hundred bucks. It's important that my wife can do this work herself. She is not computer-illiterate but not a programmer herself. She is a typical end user.
My brother is very into genealogy and has tried several software and online services, however he has always done his wooden family trees for print and gifting in Illustrator.
This makes me think that the problem of automatically generating a family tree that looks good enough to be put in a frame is not yet solved, though I haven't done the research myself.
If you're willing to put in the time with LaTeX, there is a very good package for generating some exceptionally beautiful family trees with the https://www.ctan.org/pkg/genealogytree package.
But then someone surely has the genius idea to offer this as a cloud solution for free. Then we have ads such that suddenly I have a sister called Coca Cola. Or it is maliciously implemented freemium, for example someone spent hours entering their family and printing is only possible for a fee.
Perhaps my wife is lucky and there is solid non-cloud desktop software which she groks. Then she is proud to have a family tree which she grew herself.
I remember asking myself exactly the same question some time ago. There is third party support for PostgreSQL [1] and MongoDB [2] which allows (in theory) for collaboration as the database may be hosted anywhere. However, I haven't tested this and it's far from trivial to be set up securely for most people I guess. Also, I don't know if you can configure some sort of permission management in such a setup which is a must if you don't trust your collaborators.
Minus all of the data though. That’s why people pay for Ancestry, is because they go in to countries around the world and pay to digitize archives and make them available to subscribers. Usually data like the census is made available on a rolling basis so every year there is new data to process and release
FamilySearch data seems OK to me (idly curious rather than a serious researcher) and LDS (which it is run by) doesn't proselytize on the site, while Ancestry and other commercial services are constantly selling themselves.
FamilySearch is excellent and has a ton of primary sources once you get used to how to find them. Ancestry.com's main advantage is that it provides "hints" that suggests sources for your ancestors. It's super easy to add those sources and people to your tree. That's also its main weaknesses, because these sources and hints are sometimes completely wrong, and are then copied and repeated by many genealogists until they take on a veneer of truth through sheer repetition.
FamilySearch also provides hints ("research helps") with the same up and downsides. Perhaps this is a recent feature, I've only used the site since early this year.
I feel like there's an opportunity to do automated data quality assessment, and to provide some indication of that in the UI/with the data.
Overall though I'm fairly impressed with the fluidity of the UI and speed of the site, would be curious to know about their backend.
Thanks, I was not aware of this option, I love the idea of self hosted data that I can back up myself and is not dependant on a 3rd party online service or app that could go out of business. Much appreciated.
I haven't seen any tool that does a really good job for organizing new research. For that task you want collections of source material, notes, and speculations which may be tied to an individual, a family, a location, a surname, or other ad-hoc organization schemes.
Existing software is universally bad at the "here's some pieces I'm trying to sort out" research tasks. The organization with research is less based on individuals and their relationships and more on source documents and their contents and associations and interpretations.